Château Ventenac

Archive for the ‘Poetry courses’ Category

‘Our element is time’, wrote Philip Larkin. Poetry both witnesses and defies the passage of time. Poems of love, death, war and celebration must all negotiate with time. The very music of poetry depends on organizing time. How can this most powerful and mysterious element be made present in poems? How do we give life to memory and catch time as it flies?

Ten poets are gathered this week at Chateau Ventenac to work with the award winning poet Sean O’Brien. Workshop activities, group discussion and individual tutorials all form part of what is proving to be an intriguing and stimulating week’s work.

Chateau Ventenac provides a unique space in which to find a new perspective on your work…perhaps it’s the Languedoc landscape turning green in front of our eyes or the boats on the Canal du Midi quietly moving past our front gate that aids the thought process?? I’d love to hear what our guests this week think?

Chateau Ventenac Writing Courses is proud to be able to bring you a new poem from one of our regular tutors, Sean O’Brien.

From his new collection of poems due to be published next year, this poem was written after his stay at Chateau Ventenac in March 2010 and I’d like to thank him for his generosity in allowing me to reproduce it here.

Sean will be back at Chateau Ventenac  in April 2011 to run a poetry writing course “About Time”. For details see the Chateau Ventenac Writing Courses website at www.chateauventenac.com/courses

A note from Sean

‘I was teaching a course at the Chateau in April 2010, and as usual, was very much enjoying it despite knowing that at any time I might receive news of the death of my close friend and mentor, the poet Peter Porter, who had been gravely ill when I’d last seen him shortly before leaving England. It was still a blow, on 23 April, when I received the phone call telling me he’d died. Peter had himself visited Ventenac, years before Julia began offering courses here, and had remembered it clearly. If you have been fortunate enough to come here you may recognize some of the places and people that found their way into the poem I subsequently wrote.’

Leavetaking

In memory of Peter Porter
 

In a draughty terrace bar

Beside the cave at Chateau Ventenac,

And lapped by the green Midi canal,

I take my leave, old friend,

By raising une pression and not

The Minervois that you would recommend.

Bad news prefers its poison cold and long.

The news has not improved so far -

So, keep the decent bottle in the rack

For later, for the ‘decent interval’

That death like a bureaucracy requires.
 

Or maybe neck it in the midnight heat

Up at the house when everyone’s in bed,

At one end of the huge white tablecloth,

At which a Nazi colonel also sat

To sample the warm south

While waiting for the war to end -

The kind of fact you would absorb

For later, but there is no later now.

Flute-playing psychopaths all must

Like cats and poets come to dust,

But I will not be reconciled.
 

The evening boats slide in,

Last autumn’s leaves still piled

Along their guttering and in the seats

Of plastic chairs left out on deck

In token of a former merriment

In which I am required to believe

When the patron, a rugby star

From some time back, limps past

To put another freezing glass beside the last,

Then fire the oven up with grubbed-up vines

And stand admiring its crimson speech

As though like alcohol it were

A kind of poetry. My friend,

Is there sufficient detail for you yet?

You’d know much faster than I ever could

The point at which the orchestration starts

And evening is converted into art.
 

La patronne with her brutal crop

And wide-girl suit comes out

To criticize the styling of the blaze.

The grinning barman comes by bicycle

And finds their bickering, the bar,

The voices from the dim canal, the flicker

Of the bunting’s spectral tricolores

A stage to serve his wordless drollery:

These are perhaps our characters, but where’s

The crowd to fill the choruses

Of black-edged pastoral?

The world, you’d say, exists

Not to be understood

But to demand conviction. I assent,

As if it matters, and the dancers have arrived,

Cool, pink-pastelled blondes who

In another life have raised

A parapluie at Cherbourg, squired

By lupine George Chakirises in black.
 

This is the world, or part of it.

They do not think themselves Shakespearean,

Although you might, were we to sit

Beside the water here, me with une pression

And you among the quiet notes you will transform

Into a poem in the high nine hundreds.

I have not learned your lesson yet.

Work is good, like love and company,

But these so-courteous deaths, who sweep

Their maidens up and down the shore

In perfect silence on their light fantastic feet

(When did the music stop?), insist

That they are quite another thing,

Sent from a place less beautiful than this

But just as carefully designed,

The shade beyond the trees and the canal,

Where evening ends, and songs likewise,

And there is no one left to sing.
 

Sean O’Brien

from November

(Picador, 2011)

Today at Chateau Ventenac sees the start of Pascale Petit’s Poetry Course ”Freeing the Imagination”….and everyone managed to beat the volcanic ash cloud. Well done all!!

We picked up the poets from Beziers, Carcassonne and Narbonne – home in time for Lucy’s delicious dinner followed by an initial sesssion with Pascale.

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May 9th to 15th

This week sees another poetry course at Chateau Ventenac where Maurice Riordan leads  ”Craft & Voice: developing the imagination” The sun is out, the pool is open and as I write this throughout the gardens poets sit in various quiet shady spots writing, thinking and preparing for their next workshop session with Maurice.

See more photos from Maurice’s poetry course at Chateau Ventenac

Chateau Ventenac Courses started the Spring 2010 season well despite the problems caused by the Volcanic ash travel disruption.

Atlantique Suite at Chateau ventenac

Sean O’Brien ran his course “A Place of Poetry” from April 18th – 24th 2010 and those participants who managed to get here thoroughly enjoyed it. To quote one poet……

… thanks so much for making me feel so at home again in Ventenac. Another great if somewhat different week! I always find it inspiring to work with Sean, and the company was very congenial. And as for my bedroom, well!!